Lowri Denman was 23 when she traveled across India with a backpack over her shoulder, eating vegetarian to take care of herself. She never imagined that 2007 trip would leave her with a guest that would take years to show itself.
Four years later, in the bathroom of a café in Cardiff, she passed a worm nearly a meter long.
It was only the first chapter. In 2011, a seizure led her to get brain scans, and that was when doctors found something even they did not expect: 38 parasites lodged in her brain, the result of neurocysticercosis.
What followed was almost a decade of epilepsy, hallucinations, paranoia, and a psychosis so severe that she lost her driver’s license, left her job, and in 2016 spent three months admitted to a neuropsychiatric unit in the United Kingdom.
“I ended up with severe psychosis and paranoia”, she herself said. Her doctors were even more direct: they say it is a case they will probably never see again.